Fear of Isolation
by HoshisamaValmor
Summary: He was alone in the lodge to build his plan. He couldn't be alone with himself.


Author's Note: I'll make use of my end note on all my latest fics: this has weak plot and it's simple, but I just wanted to write something about Josh.

 **Warning:** I know that Josh has real mental illnesses. I'm not familiar with medication and I don't want to be offensive or insensitive to the subject. At the same time, I'm consciously writing about a character that is altering the schedules of his medication, already wrong/insufficient to begin with, and galloping into a breakdown state.

Disclaimer: Man, I wouldn't mind owning Until Dawn even it's small mistakes, but I don't.

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It dawned to him at times. Creeping, shrieking, echoing, resonating.

He'd try to push it back. To steady his breathing, to focus on his work. Get a hold of his bearings, his blood pumping on the excitement he was building.

It didn't work most of the time. His breathing wouldn't steady for long. The sounds wouldn't vanish, maybe just decrease in the morning. The silence screamed even louder. The consuming sense of failure that threatened to suffocate him.

Josh kept his meds close and more or less accounted for. On the first week - maybe during the first couple of days. Or was it longer than that? When the excitement took over, he'd forget about them altogether and everything worked fine and proved all the medicine he needed to be alright really was to get the prank finished. Revenge is the best medicine.

Then the walls around him would grow and the cold sweats would come with the creeping sounds and the screeching silence and the failure would crawl into his chest and he'd capsize more pills than he should.

Impressive how so many years of meds could fuck up so much of you. _Gotta always be more, higher dosages. Body reacts like alcohol, like hardcore drugs._ Like that time when he tried to increase the effect of the amitriptyline by swallowing the pills down with beer. Needless to say how that worked out, specially when he forgot it was mom and dad's night home. Dr Hill's report had the date duly noted.

Well, he only tried to push it on the effect because those pills weren't helping. _Those weren't helping with the depression. Gotta get new meds and get so pumped up in pills you no longer remember you want to kill yourself._

Those thoughts also helped to explain his wavering schedules, but he didn't want to kill himself now that everything was finally going to work out. He was **fine** and he'd be even better. Everyone would be back to party and the lodge wouldn't be so empty again. It was so fucking empty and quiet. So alone.

 _Focus, man._

"Have you been taking your pills?" his mom asked when she called.

"Yeah, mom."

"You must be excited, it's been weeks you've been up there!"

"Come on, don't be like that. It hasn't been that long, and I've been home just last week."

"And before that you've been there for a while. Coming by a couple of days to get a food supply doesn't count."

Josh sighed loudly, smiling as he held the phone close.

"But yeah, I'm really happy. It'll be good to have the guys here again."

Mom paused on the other side.

"If you say so. And... you, are you sure you..."

"I've told you already."

"Dr Hill called." Josh winced at the words. "He's worried about you, has he messaged you?"

Josh moved to his cellphone in reflex, where he knew very well the messages were.

"No."

"Are you sure you feel the sessions aren't helping?"

Josh tried to reply _'Tell him that I'm happy and my friends are coming by';_ it'd make his mom rest her case and only enhance Dr Hill's worries if she did speak to the man _(fuck him),_ but he realized mid sentence that mom wasn't listening. The background voice on his phone was probably loud enough to muffle the sound on her end.

"Leave him alone already," His dad's voice seemed more familiar when he was ordering people around.

Mom sighed and picked back the line with him.

"Alright, Josh, if you say you're fine, you are." That was the opposite of what she used to say when he was a kid. _Wasn't it?_ He knew that she didn't believe the words either. "Bye, then. I don't want to hold you on the last preparations."

"Bye, mom."

As soon as the phone hang up, the weight crushed on him again, his heart pinching on a couple of skipped beats. The silence and the height and the darkness and the cold.

"No, no, I'm fine." _I'm fine._ He was not gonna take the pills today, he said he wouldn't because tomorrow night they were coming and everything would be better because Hannah and Beth would be avenged and he'd feel good and calm and happy.

Everything would be alright.

"So fuck off." The sound of his voice made it seem less lonely and shut that part of himself that was crawling in with the doubts, fear and that horribly real cold of this place.

He attended the last preparations. The pigs' heads were the most troublesome. But he tried to forget about it.

Last thing he did was turn off the power panel, lest he forgot in the morning (as if he'd forget, but...) and roamed back in the house with the flashlight. Everything seemed well, and like no one had been there.

The screeching echoed very faintly.

The final night was the worst.

He thought about calling him mom again to hear a voice. Remembering dad's words sent a chill down his spine, even under the huge warm cover he'd cuddle under with the girls when they were kids. He didn't want to be alone.

Call his mom or call Sam... he'd have to go turn everything back up, or turn everything the batteries and sneak back in the lodge. It wasn't worth it either way. Sam would be here tomorrow and they'd talk, they'd play cat and mouse and she'd scold him afterwards, if she dared to say he was wrong in wanting them to pay for Hannah and Beth.

They'd left him alone! They forced him to be alone here

That made him worse. It was _that,_ that triggered all the worst things.

He couldn't be here alone.

Tomorrow it would be alright.

He couldn't be alone with himself.

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the end

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Author's Note: I cannot disassociate myself from today's date and Chester Bennington's suicide. I'm too shocked.

I had this draft stored. I had planned to post it today either way, and now, I just wish I could put into words and into images a mere sample of the help and inspiration Linkin Park has been for me for more than a decade.

 **Thanks for reading.** Sorry for the apparently mismatched note, but yet, maybe not.


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